2011 — 26 October: Wednesday
It had to happen: sooner or later1 no matter what you're doing, if you're running a Windows system you get a BSOD. Yippee!
G'night. In disgust. Grrr.
Furthermore...
... it's been pouring with rain until a few minutes ago, though the morning sky is now half black cloud and half duck-egg blue non-cloud. A day for staying in, I suspect. And drinking tea.
Homo saps
If I have recommended one SF novel2 more than any others over the years, it will be Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar". I was amazed by its style and technique (though I only later realised how [very] closely it followed in the typewriter ribbon trail blazed by John Dos Passos and "U.S.A."). There is a great deal in this piece to explain my long-standing distaste for the magazine in which it appears. But at least it starts well. Source and snippet:
In 1950 the whole population of the earth — 2.5 billion — could have squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, onto the Isle of Wight, a 381-square-kilometre rock off southern England. By 1968 John Brunner, a
British novelist, observed that the earth's people — by then 3.5 billion — would have required the Isle of Man, 572 square kilometres in the Irish Sea, for its standing room. Brunner forecast that by
2010 the world's population would have reached 7 billion, and would need a bigger island. Hence the title of his 1968 novel about over-population, "Stand on Zanzibar" (1,554 square kilometres off east Africa).
Brunner's prediction was only a year out.
Nor do I think I'd classify the novel quite so simplistically, but that could just be Shalmaneser and Chad C Mulligan talking :-)
Marks of distinction
I'm a great fan of the Interrobang and even went to the trouble of creating one when I was typesetting the second edition of the "Chronicle of CICS". Here are a few of its companions — filched from the WSJ journal article by Henry Hitchings that lurks a click away:
Which reminds me, it was Carol who first introduced me to the adjective "snarky" and (rather indirectly) led me to this:
I'm feeling virtuous. I've just filled the mini-sucker by using it just on the stair carpet. It reminded me of the occasion when the IBM Hursley software lab had a 'royal' weekend visitor, for whom worn carpets were replaced, but only in line of sight of the exalted one's eyeballs. (No point wasting good corporate American profits on UK royalty, is there?)
Time I got ready for the great outdoors. I have a last-minute lunch date. And we're between showers.
What happens to...
... days after you've finished with them, I wonder? At the speed with which they go whizzing past (into the past)... I'm enjoying Issue #1300 of "Private Eye", which is also the 50th anniversary edition. Good front cover, too, neatly demonstrating the effectiveness of satire in the UK. But now it's 18:25 and, despite a full cooked lunch in Brambridge and an amiable chatter, hunger pangs are once again doing what they do best.
Then, after the ice-cream and cherries in kirsch, but almost before you can say whatever it is you say, it's time for more sleep. G'night.